Archivists

When I ask Frank Cifaldi, the founder and director of the Video Game History Foundation, to explain the importance of preserving and maintaining old video games, he answers with a movie analogy. Imagine, he said, “if movies were only released on, like, VHS, ever. You want to watch Back to the Future? All right, you have to go on eBay, and you have to find an antique VHS copy that’s degraded a bit from use. You have to find a VCR that works, a TV that it plugs into — or the external scalers that make it look correct on…

With advancing console generations and the slow demise of both backward compatibility and digital game storefronts, the ability to play older games has always been tough. Through a new study from the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) and the Software Preservation Network, we now have a better understanding of just how difficult accessing older games really is. “87% of classic video games released in the United States are critically endangered,” wrote Kelsey Lewin, co-director of the Video Game History Foundation.You…

Copy of the First Folio held at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC. Credit: Daderot/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY Right now, for technological, ethical and political reasons, the world's archivists are suddenly very busy. Advances in digital imaging and communications are feeding an already intense interest in provenance,…

Given the fact that there's so much of Clive's artwork and other material assembled for "Dark Worlds," how difficult was it to determine what makes the cut and what doesn't? Phil: You've hit the nail on the head. We started out planning a book of 300 pages, and that was too much of a challenge. The publishers very kindly granted us another 50 pages to squeeze a bit more in. We've clearly had to make a balance, and what we were attempting to do was to balance the visual with the text, the familiar with the…